CFO ON HIRE
The CFO of today is a facilitator. It’s important for businesses, especially growing start-ups and mid-size businesses where having an in-house CFO does not make commercial sense, to have someone reliable on an outsourced basis. The effectiveness of the role depends on how well the CFO can integrate with the existing team, much like having an in-house person.
Businesses today cannot thrive on financial metrics alone. We agree that it is the most important role for a CFO - but being able to visualise numbers in the context of a company’s non-financial factors is critical to be great at this job.
At Evalua8, we are passionate about management accounting and performance metrics.
Evalua8 Value Proposition
1. Understand the company culture, broad financial plans and what we call success factors. What makes your company unique?
2. We then create metrics around these factors. For the financials, we use Xero’s Budget Manager or Spotlight forecasting to form a plan for the Company. This does not have to be an annual process, but companies can start this anytime during the year. Once companies are used to the process, we then plan ahead for the ensuing annual year.
3. Plug in non-financial factors –This is the hardest part of our job and the metrics we create to gauge performance is specific to each company. These are factors like employee retention, client satisfaction, best use of company resources etc.
4. Gauge actuals for both against budgets/estimates. We then create a set of performance reports on a monthly basis and have a meeting with clients to discuss this in detail. The meeting is usually in person or via Skype / gotomeeting if the clients are located overseas.
5. Decide on action/improvement points for the coming period – usually the next month.
From our experience, the more we repeat the process, the more we identify problem areas and create solutions for them. When clients have an in-depth understanding of their business, the valuation and long-term planning of where we want to go and what kind of business we want to be is clear and easy to transition.